My main gripe if the offical client is the lack of multi account support, Yeah I know it has an account switcher but a) its only desktop atm b) you only get notifactions from the account you are currently using. The "workaround" is to multi-client.
The thing is with IRC, its a protocol, so any client supporting the protocol works, If one client doesn't support the features you want you can swap to another, if no client supports the feature you want you can hack it onto an existing one / create your own.
I am part of a few programming/language communities that are both on discord and IRC. I noticed that discord lends itself to...low quality discourse, so to speak.
On discord there is more emote, picture and link spam and more "joking around with memes", and that is despite the fact that the discord servers already have dedicated channels for certain topics.
Now this is a very subjective observation on my part, but I believe that there will always be a place for plaintext communication, since it automatically filters a lot of noise and demands a lot less mental overhead to keep running in the background.
Please note that I am not really nostalgic for IRC, since I am a pretty recent user. I'm at an age where I barely missed the "golden IRC years" and when I got into programming it was already declared dead by many, whatever that even means given that some people have been claiming the death of IRC for a long time now.
Discord has absolutely hurt IRC, and supplanted it in many cases. Once upon a time, e.g. subreddits had their chats on Snoonet IRC, now it's all discord. Tech is still IRC-heavy, but Discord, Slack and Matrix all have sizeable presences now too.
My main gripe if the offical client is the lack of multi account support, Yeah I know it has an account switcher but a) its only desktop atm b) you only get notifactions from the account you are currently using. The "workaround" is to multi-client.
The thing is with IRC, its a protocol, so any client supporting the protocol works, If one client doesn't support the features you want you can swap to another, if no client supports the feature you want you can hack it onto an existing one / create your own.